This application relates to a fuel-cell system supplying electricity to electronic devices.
Fuel cell converts fuels directly into electricity by means of chemical reaction. A preferred fuel cell is a hydrogen fuel cell that uses hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity. The fuel cell may comprise a stack of phosphoric acid fuel cells or a plurality of solid membrane electrode assembly fuel cells, for example solid polymer fuel cells. Typically, in order to use more conveniently available fuel such as methanol, the system may need a fuel processor, also known as reformer, to convert a methanol into hydrogen for subsequent usage. If such a system of fuel cell is miniaturized, it can be used to replace the battery, entirely or part thereof, and eliminate recharging common to laptop computers or cellular phones.
Typically, a fuel processor must be operated at elevated temperature to work properly. The ability to miniature the fuel cell system thus has been limited by complex thermal and scale factors. A different approach to shrink the size fuel cell system has led to invention such as direct conversion of alcohol to electricity. However, direct fuel cell requires multi-layers of different catalytic films with complex fluid delivering mechanism which reduces overall efficiency of the system.